In Search Of The Shamans' Vanishing Wisdom

By CHRISTOPHER HALLOWELL

The old shaman placed a bamboo shoot filled with hallucinogenic snuff against Mark Plotkin's left nostril and blew into the tube. Plotkin's head snapped back, he recalls, as if he "had been hit with a war club." Little men began dancing before his eyes. He asked the shaman who they were. "They are the hekuri," the wise man replied, "the spirits of the forest."

That was 1987, and Plotkin was deep in a Venezuelan rain forest. Then director of plant conservation for the World Wildlife Fund, he had heard of a hallucinogen used by Yanomamo medicine men. Made from the leaves, sap and seeds of various plants, the potent snuff might have medicinal benefits, he thought. After all, aspirin came from white willow bark, which North American Indians relied on to relieve pain. In fact, plants were vital in the development of 25% of all prescription drugs.

The study of plants used by indigenous peoples is called ethnobotany, and Plotkin had been steeped in the subject ever since his college years at Harvard a decade earlier. He had taken a course taught by Richard Evans Schultes, a pioneer ethnobotanist who had spent years in the Amazon rain forest. During the first lecture, Professor Schultes showed a slide of what appeared to be three Indians in grass skirts and bark-cloth masks dancing under the influence of some kind of potion. "The one on the left has a Harvard degree," the professor said, pointing out how far some ethnobotanists will go to pursue their research. That was when Plotkin, now 43, decided he had found his calling.

After graduating in 1979, he headed for the Amazon and began visiting shamans, some of whom let him stay for a while as a student medicine man. He slept in thatched huts, ate delicacies like boiled rat, suffered vampire-bat bites and was nearly electrocuted by a giant eel. And he collected, as fast as he could, hundreds of plants that supplied ingredients for the shamans' medical arsenal.

He was racing against time, as Western influences seeped into native villages. Thatch roofs were giving way to tin, while shorts and T shirts were replacing breechcloths and feathers. The shamanistic tradition was fading because missionaries brought in modern medicine's pills--many developed from rain-forest plants in the first place. Most ominously, the Amazon rain forest was dying around the edges, torched and slashed by farmers and loggers. Somewhere in the jungle might be a cure for AIDS or cancer that would be lost forever before it could even be discovered.

Plotkin soon realized that his work could play a role in saving the rain forest. The key was to help persuade indigenous peoples and their governments that they stood to gain more in the long run if they preserved their trees and cultures than if they let timber companies strip the land. The knowledge of the shamans--and the secrets that new generations of shamans might uncover--could be worth a fortune, especially since herbal medicine is booming in developed countries. Interest in medicinal plants is "real sweet right now," Plotkin says. "Indians are potentially the best conservationists out there, but only if they understand the value of the forest around them."

To help nourish that understanding and preserve the wisdom of the shamans, Plotkin founded the not-for-profit Ethnobiology and Conservation Team in 1995. Working from Arlington, Va., offices, Plotkin and his wife Liliana, a Costa Rican conservationist, have forged a network of Internet sites that enables researchers to share information about indigenous peoples. More important, the organization, to be renamed the Amazon Conservation Team in January, has created what might be called the first shaman network. The idea is to encourage younger members of indigenous groups to become shamans' apprentices. Next year A.C.T. will help sponsor a Colombian rain-forest gathering at which 40 shamans and apprentices from nine South American tribes will share secrets.

Plotkin has done a skillful job of reaching a broader audience. He is featured in Amazon, a large-format IMAX film nominated for an Academy Award. His 1993 book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, is in its 16th printing, and a children's book, The Shaman's Apprentice, co-authored by Lynne Cherry, came out this year. Next year he plans to publish Healer's Quest: New Medicines from Mother Nature. Among the remedies described: an antibiotic from a tropical daisy and a painkiller from the skin of the South American poison-dart frog.

And what of the hallucinogenic snuff that made Plotkin's head swim a decade ago? French scientists are studying the ability of an ingredient--sap from a nutmeg tree--to fight fungal infections. That's just one power of "the spirits of the forest." If those spirits were to vanish, the world would be a much poorer place.

--By Christopher Hallowell